Since discussion about tournaments has died down for the moment and a lot of packet-writing seems to be either on the horizon or happening right now (Penn Bowl, Cardinal Classic, ACF Winter and Regionals, etc.), I thought now would be a good time to post a thread about neat places to find material both relevant to question-writing and good for studying or reading. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a few canonical places to find question material that have gained traction (Masterplots, Grove, and Britannica spring to mind), and I thought it would be cool to expand that list.

So: here is your opportunity to share places you love to find interesting stuff to put in questions, or interesting stuff to remember for tournaments. Hopefully, given the diversity of interests of people on the board, we can cover lots of subject areas.

I'll start off by saying that my favorite source for information about composers is Harold Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers, which I've read cover-to-cover maybe three times. It's that good. It doesn't go into the depth you'd like for specific works, but as a jumping-off point for music studying and for question ideas, it's awesome. For more detail, check out Michael Steinberg's The Symphony and The Concerto, or for something you can find sans library, check out Famous Composers and their Works on Google Books.

I'm also a fan of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has long, detailed entries on lots of important philosophers. I'm just starting to read it in any depth, but I like what I see so far.

For history topics, you can usually find pretty in-depth stuff on the subjects you need by searching Google Books. There's a lot of public domain history stuff which is decent, and even better is previews of recent accounts/biographies which are often accessible.

Artstor is a good resource when writing painting tossups, especially if you're looking to write common link art tossups. Plus, it's neat to see some of the lesser known works of various artists in pretty high quality.

You need an educational license to access the full encyclopedia, but if your school has one, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (formerly known as the Grove Music Encyclopedia) is THE source for everything music.

They have a companion volume for visual art that I have yet to explore, but seems very promising.

Also, I usually go to http://plato.stanford.edu/ for most of my philosophy needs. (EDIT: not sure how I missed Chris already mention this above. Well, I'll second its usefulness...)

I like Google Books. I've also gotten into the habit of writing stuff based on the monographs I'm reading in class (obviously works better for history questions and if you're using quality monographs instead of just general survey textbooks).

If you actually want to appreciate a piece as you write about classical music, most schools have subscriptions to Naxos, which has streaming recordings of almost any piece of classical music you can imagine.

EDIT: For reference you can find a complete listing of recordings in their catalog here (warning: pdf link).

These are all fine sources, I'll add marxists.org as a readily available site for lots of primary works.

If all else fails and you seek to write a question from online sources, I suggest just doing a Google search where you search for not only the subject you're writing on but also add a handful of clues you know to be good. That way, you increase your chances of finding a comprehensive and trustworthy page, though you'll want to cross-reference of course. You can also restrict your search to a .edu domain, and sometimes that yields decent results.

Ryan Westbrook, no affiliation whatsoever.

I am pure energy...and as ancient as the cosmos. Feeble creatures, GO!

Left here since birth...forgotten in the river of time...I've had an eternity to...ponder the meaning of things...and now I have an answer!

For fine arts, I like the Web Gallery of Art. It has good profiles of pretty much anyone you would want to write a question on and a lot of quality reproductions.

Douglas Graebner, Walt Whitman HS 10, Uchicago 14
"... imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid."-Sir James Frazer,The Golden Bough

This is a fantastic idea for a thread, could it be made a sticky post thing somewhere, so people have it at their disposal?

Also, I was wondering if people had good places to go for SCIENCE! topics, I mean I always find myself drawing from very disparate sources, either obscure papers on ScienceDirect or IngentaConnect or basic encyclopedia sources, which make for awkwardly disjointed tossups.

Ahmad Ragab, itinerant moderator at the New School for Social Research

ACF Nationals 2011:"Too real for the streets"
-Auroni Gupta

"Can 40,000 redacted topic Tossups be wrong?"

"With my gnomes I'm highlighting the danger of political opportunism and right-wing ideology. I get the feeling that this gnome has reopened an old wound."
-Ottomar Hoerl

SnookerUSF wrote:This is a fantastic idea for a thread, could it be made a sticky post thing somewhere, so people have it at their disposal?

Also, I was wondering if people had good places to go for SCIENCE! topics, I mean I always find myself drawing from very disparate sources, either obscure papers on ScienceDirect or IngentaConnect or basic encyclopedia sources, which make for awkwardly disjointed tossups.

I think Westbrook's advice is pretty good here. While you might not get the most in-depth treatment of a science topic if you just google it, you'll get something deeper if you google a common middle clue for it. (In all likelihood, you'll find a specialized encyclopedia-type resource or maybe some lecture notes.) Also, JACS (at least; probably many other science journals) seems to require authors to contain enough background information that you don't have to jump from an obscure result about the genes that code for apoptosis-related proteins in newts straight to "buzz when I say Bax, guys." You'll have a smooth transition; though it'll still be framed a little bit in the context of that specific result, and you'll need to check out a few more sources to get a more complete picture.

That said, the best source is external knowledge. Give me a perfect music resource (I've used that Oxford, and I love it to death) and I'll still write a pretty crappy music tossup, since I don't have a handle on clue order or notability or what the words I use mean (at least not in the deep way actual music people do). That's the real utility of an extremely available resource like Wikipedia: if you know nothing at all about quicksort, you'll learn something about quicksort and you'll get the bonus of a few sweet GIFs.

SnookerUSF wrote:This is a fantastic idea for a thread, could it be made a sticky post thing somewhere, so people have it at their disposal?

Also, I was wondering if people had good places to go for SCIENCE! topics, I mean I always find myself drawing from very disparate sources, either obscure papers on ScienceDirect or IngentaConnect or basic encyclopedia sources, which make for awkwardly disjointed tossups.

For organic, I find www.organic-chemistry.org pretty helpful. It is searchable and has recent literature on most important reactions.

And, a big part of running a successful general Google search is being able to escape the morass of Wikipedia clone sites out there. If you can add enough info to your search to do that, you can probably get what you want.

Ryan Westbrook, no affiliation whatsoever.

I am pure energy...and as ancient as the cosmos. Feeble creatures, GO!

Left here since birth...forgotten in the river of time...I've had an eternity to...ponder the meaning of things...and now I have an answer!

No Rules Westbrook wrote:And, a big part of running a successful general Google search is being able to escape the morass of Wikipedia clone sites out there. If you can add enough info to your search to do that, you can probably get what you want.

This is especially frustrating, and valuable, when Wikipedia actually contains a fact that, if sourced (which it of course isn't) could make for a clue that's never come up before. Trying to find it in another source is part of the long haul that usually leads you to "it's something the editor made up" but occasionally it'll bring you to a very, very good legitimate source.

I usually like to find overviews of stuff on Britannica, or yes, even Wikipedia, and note what seems to be important and interesting. Then I take that and try to corroborate with legitimate primary-source information, scholarly articles, etc. This is a great way to find out even better details about the stuff that's important. I think that a lot of times, people are so worried about writing from Wiki or such sources that they write questions from the top down; that is, they read one study on PubMed and think that they can use stuff from it as a clue. I think that clues should come from the bottom up. Put another way, clues should be drawn from the pool of things that people are could possibly know. A good way to try to adhere to this is to draw from a condensed overview of your question topic (even if it is Wikipedia) and build up from that.

I'm surprised that so few have mentioned textbooks as a source of quality material, especially for science. I ended up using a fair number of textbooks in our libraries to get good clues for a large portion of the science at Minnesota Open.

The best thing I like about textbooks is that there are so many of them; if you find one to be too dense, there will always be another one at your disposal which will be easier to read. Furthermore, a lot of them are written so that if you have a good understanding of the basic concepts in the field, you can pretty much understand the concepts in a more specific sub-field.

There is a reference work called simply Encyclopedia of Religion that I have found extremely useful for myth and religion questions that you may have access to electronically via your library. It's quite excellent.